Mechanisms of cell size regulation in slow-growing Escherichia coli cells: discriminating models beyond the adder
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Nature Research
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Under ideal conditions, Escherichia coli cells divide after adding a fixed cell size, a strategy known as
the adder. This concept applies to various microbes and is often explained as the division that occurs
after a certain number of stages, associated with the accumulation of precursor proteins at a rate
proportional to cell size. However, under poor media conditions, E. coli cells exhibit a different size
regulation. They are smaller and follow a sizer-like division strategy where the added size is inversely
proportional to the size at birth. We explore three potential causes for this deviation: degradation of the
precursor protein and two models where the propensity for accumulation depends on the cell size: a
nonlinear accumulation rate, and accumulation starting at a threshold size termed the commitment
size. These models fit the mean trends but predict different distributions given the birth size. To
quantify the precision of the models to explain the data, we used the Akaike information criterion and
compared them to open datasets of slow-growing E. coli cells in different media. We found that none of
the models alone can consistently explain the data. However, the degradation model better explains
the division strategy when cells are larger, whereas size-related models (power-law and commitment
size) account for smaller cells. Our methodology proposes a data-based method in which different
mechanisms can be tested systematically
U.S. Department of Health & Human Services | NIH | National Institute of General Medical Sciences (R35GM148351)
U.S. Department of Health & Human Services | NIH | National Institute of General Medical Sciences (R35GM148351)
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Investigación agropecuaria - A50, Escherichia coli, Biología molecular, Proteínas, Transversal, http://aims.fao.org/aos/agrovoc/c_33700, http://aims.fao.org/aos/agrovoc/c_4891, http://aims.fao.org/aos/agrovoc/c_13621